Squabbling siblings and San Diego private eye brothers RICK andA.J. SIMON attempted to answer that question every week for seven seasons, in one of the eighties' more popular detective series. Slick, glib. Fluff. Maybe Fenton shoulda taken 'em behind the woodshed more often.

Rick (Gerald McRaney) was the oldest of the two, the one with the cowboy hat. He's a wild card with rough edges, and some bad memories from his two tours of duty in Vietnam. He's cynical, a bit of a scrapper, and perfectly content to live his life on his boat and drive his pickup truck.

He's supposedly the polar opposite of his brother, cutie-pie A.J. (Andrew Jackson), an idealistic, ambitious former law student and current suit who thinks of himself as refined. He listens to classical music and opera, dresses in suits and ties, and enjoys fine wine and french cuisine. He's the good one.

Forgetting for a moment that only on television would anyone really buy Rick as a tough guy, or A.J. as actually refined, just because he wears a tie or listens to the opera, the show had an amusing premise. But the big differences were not on the level of, say, Oscar and Felix. More on the level of Fred and Barney, if you ask me. Still, some of their bickering was amusing, and McRaney and Parker were affable and easy enough to watch. But the scripts were, for the most part, merely servicable.

Not that there weren't a few interesting shows. In "The Shadow Of Sam Penny," A.J.'s idol, a famous private eye ("The Man Who Wrote The Book") hires the Simons to help crack a thirty-year old case. It's a moderately witty homage to Dashell Hammett's The Maltest Falcon, but they get extra points for including Elisha Cook (he played the gunsel in the original Huston directed flick) in the cast. Robert Lansing, as Sam Penny, returned in "Reunion At Alcatraz," to enlist the boys' help once more, this time to track down the only con to ever escape from Alcatraz, over twenty-five years ago. And a few episodes were scripted by various crime novelists, including Ross Thomas, Thomas Perry and Howard Browne, who adapted his own 1948 novel, Thin Air (not the first time that puppy's been walked around the block).

But for every moderately intelligent script there were plenty of gimmick shows. In "The Apple Doesn't Fall Far From The Tree," Rick And A.J. head to Boston to track down the family tree, and end up discovering the stories of various Simons brothers throughout American history -- all played by McRaney and Parker, of course.

The boys got to play dress up again in "Play It Again, Simon," wherein A.J. tracks down a long-lost manuscript by his favorite detective novelist, allowing the cast to play out a 1940's detective story. Didn't they do this on Magnum, too?

Then there's the almost obligatory-for-the-time Vietnam flashback show, "I Thought The War Was Over," co-written by Gerald McRaney himself. War is kinda bad, you know.

And there was "Second-Story Simons," the James Bond spy spoof (complete with appropriate music) with Rick and A.J. trying to swipe some top secret plans from the Yugoslavian Embassy.

But the absolute nadir has to be the episode where the boys go undercover in a nudist camp. We expect this type of thing from Shell Scott, but don't ask us to weep one week at the horrors of war, and giggle the next because someone drops their trousers.

Still, the show turned out to be very popular, and ended up being one of the most popular P.I. shows of the eighties. Obviously, there were a lot of people far more charitable than I was to the show. In fact, it was popular enough that at least one made-for-TV movie was released in the nineties, reuniting the cast, and did okay in the ratings, as far as I know.

The show's creator (and executive producer for its first four seasons) was Philip DeGuere, who got his start writing for such Huggins/Cannell shows as Alias Smith and Jones, Baretta, City of Angels and Magnum P.I., before moving into production in the eighties. His biggest success was undoubtedly Simon and Simon, for which her served as executive director and head writer, although he also was involved production-wise with Whiz Kids, the revamped Tweilight Zone and Max Headroom. He also continued to write for television, most recently for JAG, The Dead Zone and Navy NCIS. He also devised a computer system for tracking daily production of a TV series that has become an industry standard, and which may explain some of those rather formulaic scripts for Simon and Simon and Magnum -- good premises frequently done in by cookie cutter scripts, if you ask me.

UNDER OATH

"First of all, Rick and A.J. Simon were NOT in any way like the shlocky Hardy Boys. There were many shows that were not "fluff," episodes that dealt with Vietnam and Rick's two tours of duty there. The Vietnam episodes were much more than "war is bad". They were about the loss of innocence and security. I see the characters as not unlike most brothers: Close yet apart and willing to die for the other. Secondly, I've searched all over the Web for Simon and Simon graphics (Jameson Parker and Gerald McCraney as well) and have come up empty-handed. If you put some pictures on your site then maybe I won't be so pissed at your summary." (Jane Wanklin)